inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman inspired by zach lieberman zach lieberman

The Fediverse deserves a dumb graphical client 2026-04-09 18:30 I love the Fediverse. I have been on it for years, and it remains the only social network where I actually enjoy spending time. No algorithmic feed pushing outrage, no dark patterns, no surveillance capitalism. Just people talking to each other over an open protocol. But every time I wanted to recommend it to someone, I ran into the same wall: the clients are heavy. Mastodon's web interface ships megabytes of JavaScript. Elk, ...

The war in Iran, and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has unfortunately made us all familiar with details of the petroleum supply chain that we could formerly happily ignore. Every day we get some new story about some good or service that depends on Middle East petroleum and the production of which has been disrupted by the war. Fertilizer production, plastics, aluminum, the list goes on. One such supply chain that’s suddenly getting a lot of attention is helium. Helium is produ...

I posted about using the Banach-Tarski Paradox(BT)  to explain the miracle of Loaves and Fishes (LF)  here . Darling says that whenever I fool my readers or my students then I have to tell them later, so I'll tell you now: The story about me meeting with Pope and talking about the BT Paradox (that would be a good name for a rock band: B-T-Paradox) was not true. I think my readers know that.   1) I first learned the Banach-Tarski Paradox as a grad student in 1981 when I read Hillary Putnam's a...

I was inspired by, of all things, a video monologue by a Scottish surfer [1] who said that the future for them was challenging themselves in new ways. My guitar was close by and I thought maybe I should give myself a bit of a challenge too. I picked up my guitar and looked up a tutorial on how to do finger picking. The first video I found was a bit challenging. I looked for another that was easier. The one I found was a tutorial showing how to play How did it end? by Taylor Swift, a song ...

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” ― The Lord of the Rings Dunedin is a former Scottish settlement, which becomes apparent after a quick walk through the city. The name is an anglicization of the Gaelic name for Edinburgh. It is counterintuitively pronounced /dɐˈniːdɘn/ (duh-nee-din). I arrived on a Saturday during the Chinese New Year Festival , so the city was full. In fact, there was not a single accommodation available in the entire...

I love sampling algorithms. Here's the sampling algorithm that I find most magical. We want to generate a subset of {1, 2, ..., n} of size k . def floyd ( n , k ): s = set () for i in range ( n - k + 1 , n + 1 ): t = random . randint ( 1 , i ) if t in s : s . add ( i ) else : s . add ( t ) return s I learned about this algorithm the canonical way all good algorithm lore ...

Six months after we standardized on OpenSearch, a pull request introduced Datadog into a service. The ADR existed. It had been discussed, approved, and stored in the repo. The PR was still green. That is architecture drift. Not because engineers are careless. Because memory does not scale across hundreds of people and dozens of repositories. After we started checking ADRs in CI, we caught several violations like this in the first month and dozens more in the first quarter before they reach...

A Gimkit kit is a question set that powers every game mode and assignment on the platform. Before hosting a session or sending practice work, you need at least one kit with questions. The full process takes under 15 minutes from a blank dashboard to a ready-to-play set. Here is every step, plus the faster import options most teachers miss. How to Create a Kit in Gimkit from Scratch Every kit starts from the same place: your dashboard at Gimkit.com/me . You need a teacher account to build ...

Initially, we had languages like Fortran (1957), Pascal (1970), and C (1972). Fortran was designed for number crunching and scientific computing. Pascal was restrictive with respect to low-level access (it was deliberately “safe”, as meant for teaching structured programming). So C won out as a language that allowed low-level/unsafe programming (pointer arithmetic, direct memory access) while remaining general-purpose enough for systems work like Unix. To be fair, Pascal had descendants that...

After cobbling together my own eval for Claude , I was interested to discover harbor . It’s described as: A framework for evaluating and optimizing agents and models in container environments. Which sounds kinda cool, right? After cobbling together my own eval for Claude , I was interested to discover harbor . It’s described as: A framework for evaluating and optimizing agents and models in container environments. Which sounds kinda cool, right? After...

Meta announced Muse Spark today, their first model release since Llama 4 almost exactly a year ago . It's hosted, not open weights, and the API is currently "a private API preview to select users", but you can try it out today on meta.ai (Facebook or Instagram login required). Meta's self-reported benchmarks show it competitive with Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT 5.4 on selected benchmarks, though notably behind on Terminal-Bench 2.0. Meta themselves say they "continue to invest in are...

Today I’m very happy to share that Mario Zechner is joining Earendil . First things first: I think you should read Mario’s post . This is his news more than it is ours, and he tells his side of it better than I could. What I want to do here is add a more personal note about why this matters so much to me, how the last months led us here, and why I am so excited to have him on board. Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I s...

For-profit businesses weren’t the focus of the workshop I planned to create , but there is a lot to learn from the literature on how to shut companies down. See the entire series: Lessons from Disaster Management Lessons from MAID Lessons from Crisis Lessons from Business Organisational Decline Is Not a Single Event Whetten1980 argued that management science had almost entirely ignored organizational decline in favour of growth. WeitzelJonsson1989 extended this into a...

CMake has a --debugger mode since 3.27 (July 2023), allowing software to manipulate it interactively through the Debugger Adaptor Protocol (DAP), an HTTP-like protocol passing JSON messages. Debugger front-ends can start, stop, step, breakpoint, query variables, etc. a live CMake. When I came across this mode, I immediately conceived a project putting it to use. Thanks to recent leaps in software engineering productivity , I had a working prototype in 30 minutes, and by the end of that s...

While GitHub has been busy losing its last nine of availablility , I’ve been thinking about how the internet used to be. Not the internet people talk about from the 90s , but the internet that we used to have even 10-15 years ago. This was the heyday of startups like GitHub, Twitter, Airbnb, and, Google was in its prime (though likely slightly past it at that point - Linus’s git tech talk there was in 2007.) I’ve specifically been thinking about the Octocat Builder . GitHub create...

Our new (to us) local library has community jigsaw puzzles! We’ve made it a habit of contributing to at least one piece each time we go. This small gesture has done more to make us feel connected (hah!) to the suburb than I would have expected. Yesterday we added a bit of a sunflower: By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-04-10. Our new (to us) local library has community jigsaw puzzles! We’ve made it a habit of contributing to at least one piece each time we go. This small gesture has do...

I mostly link to written material here, but I’ve recently listened to two excellent podcasts that I can recommend. Anyone who regularly reads these fragments knows that I’m a big fan of Simon Willison, his (also very fragmentary) posts have earned a regular spot in my RSS reader. But the problem with fragments, however valuable, is that they don’t provide a cohesive overview of the situation. So his podcast with Lenny Rachitsky is a welcome survey of that state of world as seen throug...

I'm happy to announce the general availability of watgo - the W eb A ssembly T oolkit for G o. This project is similar to wabt (C++) or wasm-tools (Rust), but in pure, zero-dependency Go. watgo comes with a CLI and a Go API to parse WAT (WebAssembly Text), validate it, and encode it into WASM binaries; it also supports decoding WASM from its binary format. At the center of it all is wasmir - a semantic representation of a WebAssembly module that users can examine (and manipulate)....

The newest zine from my research group, “Carol’s Causal Conundrum”, is out today! You can read it online, or print your own free copies to read offline ! This zine is an introduction to causally ordered message delivery , a fundamental abstraction for distributed programming. It’s the result of a six-month collaboration between my student collaborator, Ayush Manocha, and me. In the zine, we talk about what exactly causally ordered message delivery is, what problem it solves, and a...

I stumbled across this great post by Spencer Mortensen yesterday, which tested different email obfuscation techniques against real spambots to see which ones actually work. It's a fascinating read, and I'd recommend checking it out if you're into that sort of thing. The short version is that spambots scrape your HTML looking for email addresses. If your address is sitting there in plain text, they'll hoover it up. But if you encode each character as a HTML entity , the browser still renders...

Why logging at every layer of a service produces noise, and how to log only at the handler level while propagating context from below. Why logging at every layer of a service produces noise, and how to log only at the handler level while propagating context from below.

The Artemis II launch, its four astronauts prior to liftoff, people cheering the launch, and the crew’s Orion spacecraft and its beautiful view of a crescent Earth. The flight crew from left to right: Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen , Pilot Victor Glover , Mission Specialist Christina Koch , and Commander Reid Wiseman . Images: NASA At long last, that moment is here. Humans have visited our Moon again, ending a five-decade absence since Apollo. Four astronauts launched by NASA on Ap...